Psychedelics fell from medical grace nearly half a century ago, but recent activity suggests that some researchers have ‘high hopes’ for their return. Over sixty years ago Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories in Switzerland first synthesized LSD and personally experienced its effects in 1943. Over the next 15 years, over a thousand articles appeared in medical and scientific publications based on LSD research. By the mid-1960s, LSD research ground to halt as it had become synonymous with countercultural activities, hedonism, and drug abuse. Recently, that situation has started to change. A new generation of researchers has taken up the torch with an eye to resurrecting the psychedelic science of the 1950s, particularly along the paths of addiction research and palliative care. Will this new group of enthusiasts be more nimble, or have cultural circumstances changed sufficiently to embrace psychedelics anew?

Professor Dyck is the author of Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD on the Canadian Prairies (2012, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press) and Facing Eugenics: Reproduction, Sterilization, and the Politics of Choice (2013, Toronto: University of Toronto Press). For more on Professor Dyck please refer to http://research-groups.usask.ca/history-medicine/biography.php